it is my great pleasure to introduce you to michael schoeppner. dr. michael schoeppner is an associate professor of history at the university of maine in farmington. he's an expert on the social and legal history of the 19th century united states. he's an expert. oh, i said that already. his research focuses on the movements of black migrants, seeing them as a window to understand both the broader african-american experience, as well as formal political and legal change. in 2019, cambridge university

press published dr. shatner's first book, moral contagion black atlantic soldiers, sailors, citizenship and diplomacy in antebellum america, which the southern historical association awarded the 2021 james a raleigh prize for the best book on the sectional crisis. please join me in welcoming him. thank you. thank you, bethany, for the wonderful introduction. it's wonderful to be here. this is actually my first time in newburyport and my first time at this museum. and i know i'm preaching to the choir here, but what a quaint, beautiful, charming town. and the facilities here are fantastic. so obviously, you all that are here know that the people that are watching remotely, you can take my word for it, but you should not just take my word for it. i can't wait to come back to the museum and do some research when my calendar is not so not so cramped. it's an honor to be here. i want to make a special thank

you to bethany. she put all of this together along with her staff and the work they do here is fantastic. i am a fan of any public history resource that has at its heart at least part of it, illustrating how important the maritime world is to key developments in american history. we live in an era of planes, trains and automobiles, and sometimes we forget the fact that for a good chunk of american history, transportation was all about the water, or at least primarily about the water. so a lot of things that happened, we can sort of trace back to the maritime world and trace back to places well, like newburyport. so with that, i'd like to talk to you a little bit about an epidemic of moral contagion. to get started, i want to go i want you i want to go about 1000 miles south of where we are right now. actually, it's almost exactly a thousand miles south. look, i left it up to charleston, south carolina, 1823. that's an oil painting of charleston antebellum. charleston. and i want to put you on board

one of these ships that would be sailing into charleston harbor in the summer of 1823. a vessel that looked like one of those, the homer sailed into charleston harbor from its home port of liverpool as it moored and local officials boarded the ship. that's a sort of standard fare for for customs agents, etc. and they interrogated a man by the name of henry ellison. henry albertson was then arrested, put in chains, escorted from the ship to the middle of charleston, where the city jail is. and he was basically incarcerated. the law that caused him to be incarcerated was a brand new port regulation. and when the captain asked about what was going on, the deputy sheriff who arrested him said, well, henry albertson is being arrested because he is a free black man. that was that was his crime. the crime of being of being black and not being enslaved. the captain was absolutely aghast, as many of you were a literally heard. you be aghast. he had the same sort of reaction after consulting with the

british council in charleston. he hired an attorney to sue for henry atkinson's release. there are plenty of treaties on the books between the great war, between great britain and the united states that emphatically say that the citizens of the united states and the subject of great britain, they're allowed to go to each other's port cities to conduct trade. so elkins arrest must be illegal. so they sued for a writ of habeas corpus to get henry up and sit out of jail. but an up and coming attorney in charleston steps up in the courtroom, and he answers this charge of sort of treaty violations with a very interesting response. and this attorney, by the way, was from massachusetts, benjamin hunt, and he said that the law that mandated atkinson's arrest was not a police regulation. the way that you're thinking about it's not only a criminal law, it's a quarantine. the problem with henry hudson is he's infected with a moral contagion. and that phrase moral contagion doesn't really make a whole lot of sense in contemporary sort of. we're coming out of covid and we think of contagion in like virus

bacteria. right. but but he's infected, henry appleton is infected with a moral contagion. and because he is sick with a moral contagion, we can isolate him and we can regulate him without violating any treaty rights. and in a sense, that that kind of makes sense, right to this day. we may have the right to go travel to england or whatever, but if we are visibly sick with a contagious disease, they can isolate us until we're better. right. so this would not violate the treaty. he is, in fact, dangerous. and even though the judge disagreed the heavily with this argument, there were some legal rules that prevented him from freeing wilkinson up and then remain in jail for two more weeks. and the law that caused him to be arrested in the first place remain on the books for 40 years in south carolina. by the time we get to the civil war, seven other southern states have passed similar laws outlawing the ingress of free black sailors or on this concept of moral contagion. so what i want to do today and tonight is to talk about these

laws. what was the motivation behind it? what what is so morally contagious about this sailor from jamaica sailing through liverpool? well, why is this person being targeted? why is the entire southeastern united states targeting free black sailors like henry robinson so that's that's objective number one. what's the motivation behind these laws? the second thing i want to talk about is, to me, way more interesting. and that's where the rubber meets the road and i know i'm mixing metaphors with the maritime talk. right. but but this is when the laws are being enforced. so it's one thing to have a law on the books. what did it actually look like when the laws were being enforced? what did enforcement look like? and for me, what's even more important, how are people responding to these new laws? so that's the second thing i want to cover. the third thing that i want to talk about are the larger implications of these struggles in the southern port cities of the united states. and by large, i don't mean like we should not think about what happened to free black sailors, that that those are inconsequential to other things.

i mean, larger as in those events, those react patterns have rippling effects. now i have my metaphors down right, rippling effects that go way beyond 1860 and actually inform parts of american legal and constitutional development that that we would not think happened because of what's going on in these port cities. so those are the three things motivation sort of when the laws are being enforced and resisted and then what does this mean after the civil war, when sort of the south looks very different than it did than it did beforehand? okay. almost perfect transition, right? thank you. that was to remind me to to do the slide. right. so this is a portrait from 1853. i know it's 1823, but that's that's the best. you get with the antebellum period. right. and that's a picture i took of the charleston jailhouse in 2016. if you've been to charleston, it is incredibly gentrified. and the historic district is one of the largest in the united

states and one of the only places in charleston, south of the neck, that is not sort of completely redone is the old jailhouse. and so i took this picture was completely abandoned. there was nothing there. i had to walk through the the back area, the yard. and it was it was really eerie, to be honest. all right. so first things first. motivation. there are really three reasons why these laws go into effect. the first reason is the notion of moral contain. the first law passes in south carolina in 1822, and i'm a bit of a charleston buff. so 1822, if you ask a charleston nian, that is the year of the denmark vesey conspiracy. right. so i don't know, dozens and dozens of enslaved people and a couple of free people of color are arrested and executed for supposedly orchestrating a massive slave conspiracy. supposedly, denmark vesey and his conspirators were going to cut off the charleston that that the charleston peninsula sort of like, you know, a little neck and then a big, huge peninsula

there. and they cut off the charleston neck and they were going to initiate a race war and they were going to overthrow slavery in charleston. and then they were going to wait for reinforcements from haiti in west africa to supposedly end slavery in the united states. with this sort of violent overthrow. now, historians have debated exactly how extensive this plot was. was this really a huge conspiracy or was this some overanxious city employees who were perhaps trying to cover their backsides when they thought a slave conspiracies was to happen? but then nothing actually precipitated on the night of the of the conspiracy, regardless of how extensive the plot was in the aftermath of denmark, vesey is arrest a white charles etonians are convinced that they're in the precipice of a of a of a slave war. they are terrified that the enslaved population in charleston is waiting for the next opportune time, and they are convinced that they have to do a lot of things to prevent another denmark vesey from taking place. so one of the things they want to do is they want to protect

the slave system in south carolina and they want to protect it by isolate them from what they call the dangerous currents of the atlantic world, the dangerous currents. that's that's the quote of the atlantic world. denmark vesey was not born in charleston, denmark vesey was born in west africa. he traveled around the atlantic world as a sailor. he visited saint-domingue before the haitian revolution, before he ends up in charleston as an enslaved person. there. so charles etonians were convinced that if they're going to prevent another denmark vesey, we should prevent those people who are traveling around the dangerous atlantic from coming into charleston and wreaking havoc. now, this made a lot of sense for a couple of writers. two of them are sort of here, right? that's thomas do at the bottom. he was a law professor at william and mary, and that's james henry hammond. and the top. he was a politician and plantation owner and enslaver in south carolina.

these two gentlemen use that term loosely were advocates of something called pro-slavery ideology. right. so if we think back to the american revolution, there were a lot of enslavers like thomas jefferson, patrick henry, george washington, who even though they were enslavers, expressed a very deep reservations about slavery in the new republic. right. they were apprehensive. they had fought this war based on ideas of natural rights and the idea of liberty and equality. and at the same time, they were holding people in slavery and they acknowledged fact that there was a paradox there. they acknowledged it. they didn't do enough about it. but they acknowledge the paradox and they describe slavery in a republic as a necessary evil. we should probably get rid of it, but if we did, our entire society and would fall apart and then we wouldn't have a republic to begin with. and so they expressed slavery as sort of this necessary evil. and i'll leave it to the jefferson scholars to debate whether he really meant that or if that was some sort of like facade.

but. these two individuals and the people that write like they are not their father's ideologues. they believe in something called pro slavery ideology. they're writing about slavery not as a necessary evil, but as a positive institution, a benevolent institution, an institution that was good not just for the enslavers, but for the enslaved, too. they described as a sort of like a family relationship where the enslaved was sort of like the patriarch, the father. he provided protection and food and clothing, you know, a roof over their heads, education, civilization, christianity. and in exchange for this, he expected good, firm discipline so that they would make money to keep this whole society afloat. so to enslave people supposedly, according to the city ology, were receiving civilization and the necessities of life and the enslavers were receiving extreme money so that they could ruminate about important things like public policy and philosophy and poetry, things that. so that was that's precisely

every ideology in a nutshell. right. and if we think about it, this pro-slavery ideology has a really long shelf life. i if we think about it, if you've ever seen gone with the wind, you can see remnants of this pro-slavery ideology. right. okay. so for those ideologues that are writing about pro-slavery ideology, the denmark vesey conspiracy is really helpful in pushing their case. all right. so so they're saying that that slavery is this benign institution, that that that people that are enslaved are like children they are naturally happy, docile content, and they're enslavement. but that poses the problem because if you're explaining enslaved people in that way, how do you explain denmark vesey? how do you explain that, turner? how do you explain insubordination on a daily basis? how do you explain all of these instances in which enslaved people are obviously not happy, docile and content? and this is where the democrats the conspiracy comes in really handy, right? oh, if if our enslaved population in the south was left

alone, if they were just sort of like hands off, this is how it would be. but outside agitators who come in like denmark vesey, they corrupt, they infect people of color with ideas of racial equality, with ideas of liberty, with ideas of racial uplift. so if long as we can keep those individuals away, then this slave system that that's it'll manifest itself. that's the natural sort of way of things. so they framed the denmark vesey conspiracy as proof positive that there philosophy of pro-slavery ideology, that this is the proof is in the pudding here. right. so the law that emerges in the aftermath of denmark vesey is highlighting the fact that free people of color who come into south carolina are dangerously, morally infected. and so you had to create a quarantine to prevent them from interacting with enslaved population with sort of a pandemic of slavery revolt. if you don't do this.

right. okay. so that's that's reason number one, why they enact this law. but there's another reason to and that other reason has to do with maritime networks. and i don't know if any of you have seen this book. this is tim walker's book. he's a professor down at umass dartmouth, and he edited this volume. and basically, this volume is all about i don't know if you can read the subtitle, but it's the it's the maritime dimension of the underground railroad and usually we think of the underground railroad, at least when i used to think about it when i was in college, i thought about it as sort of like it's overlap and you're enslaved, people are escaping through the woods. then you have sort of the momentous crossing of the ohio river to get from a slave territory to free territory. and so i thought about it in those sorts of terms. but it turns out that for most enslaved people who are escaping to freedom, the maritime highway is the way to go. i mean, if you live in charleston and you want to go to free territory, that is a

arduous journey. it's going to be dark. -- near impossible. -- near impossible. but if you take the maritime route way easier, way and you're much less likely to get caught. so if you pass a law that says we keep free black sailors away from the slave population, not only, do you protect this this notion of of sort of contented slaves, not only do you prevent slave unrest, but you also prevent enslave people from using the conduits by which they would get on board of a ship and escape to freedom. so these laws against free black sailors protect against slave insurrection. but they prevent slaves from running away, making it north. so it's sort of killing killing two birds with one stone. now you're paying attention, right? so, you know, said two birds with one stone. and then this. there's three birds with one stone. it is not a mistake. maybe a mistake. but there's one more thing that happens with this law. right? because, again, if the if the concern of the slaveholding class is to keep these two

groups separate, there would be another way to sort of do this. right. and that would be to very closely regulate enslaved people in urban places. right. very closely regulated. and then you don't have to worry about these sorts of things, do you? you can maintain that sort of sequestered sort of objective. but if you do that, the urban economy of the south would completely fall apart. a recent book that came out i think came out last year is viola mueller's escape to the city, and she talks about enslaved people who run away to urban areas in the south and they stay there because there is demand for work and there's an anonymity, anonymity of the city. and there are who are hiring them, regardless of what their status. actually, they don't check because the labor that the labor needs are so high. so if white charleston ins wanted to closely regulate the slave population in the city they ran the risk of stalling their economy. right. because they relied so much on the slave workers to do the work. so in a sense, by passing this

law, you sequester their the dangerous outsiders away from the slave population, you prevent the enslaved from being able to get on those vessels and running away. and you keep your urban economy intact. in a sense, there's almost a genius in the brutality of a law like this. right. it's almost beautiful in its ugliness. right. it's it's a perfected way to be brutal towards a group of people. right. okay. given these confluence of factors leading to the first law against black sailors, it should be unsurprising that other states, when they faced threats of insurrection, respond in the same way. and that's exactly what happens over the course of the next 35 years. a number of other states pass almost identical laws outlawing the ingress of free black sailors in north carolina and georgia. those are the first two to enact similar laws after south carolina. it's the arrival of david walker's appeal. and david walker was a abolitionist in boston who wrote

a scathing critique of slavery. and he talks about the the righteousness of of violent upheaval or to end slavery. if if somebody is enslaving you, you have a natural right to liberty. if they enslave you, just like the american revolutionaries, you have right to throw off that tyranny. right. so this is a really dangerous sort of publication when when david walker's appeal, a publication, a pamphlet, when it ends up in wilmington and in savannah again, the white slave owning class goes goes nuts. and they start putting into place these laws against black sailors because it was black sailors that had pamphlets on them when they arrived in these portities. so those are the next two. and that again, are florida in 1835, followed by alabama, mississippi in louisiana, texas in one in 1857. but i don't know too much about enforcement rates there. very little in terms of the of the historical record. so what does that mean? that means by 1842, you can go from newburn through wilmington, charleston, savannah, now all

the way around the florida keys to pensacola mobile, biloxi, even though at that point, biloxi is barely a swamp and new orleans and you are not allowed to be there if you're a free black sailor. if you are, you're going to be put in jail. another i'm looking at this and realizing i should have probably used an international map because there's an island right here called cuba. right. and cuba in 1837, also passes a law that says no free black people are allowed on island. they're terrified in the aftermath of british emancipation. right. jamaica is not too far away from cuba. that free black people from jamaica will invade cuba and take over. so they institute their own black quarantine. all right. so that's the motivation. now we need to get out of the sort of minds of white enslavers, and we have to start thinking about enforcement. what does it look like when sailors actually enter port cities? when these laws are on the books? so there's two different ways to think about. one of them is quantity tively.

how many people are actually being affected by these laws? and then qualitatively, i will spoiler alert. i'm much more interested in the qualitative aspects. that's just the sort of historian that i am. but as it turns out, the quantitative aspect is actually really hard. do tabulating arrests in the antebellum period. our challenge, jane, because police forces are just coming in to existence. and so the records that they keep are are sporadic at best. now, there are some port cities that have decent arrest records. one of those places is new orleans. and so this is a photograph i took of a police arrest book that is housed in the new orleans public library, the top shelf of the municipal archives are and what you can see, what this arrest record is. you see the names of three fmc, free men of color, right. who were arrested by officer lynn by virtue of a warrant on board the brig fashioned for coming into the state in

contravention of law. all right, i've got in trouble reading that. it literally took me decades to figure out how to read something that looks like that. right. but now i'm really good at reading my students handwriting. so i guess there's you multiple uses for that. but as you go through the as i went through these volumes, i started to create what i hate doing. this is the one part of doing history i don't like. i created a database, right? i literally created so that i could try to enumerate this. but the problem is, is that new orleans has four different police departments because there's four different municipalities. right. and each of those municipalities has a de police and a nightwatch that have their own volumes. and there's not sort of a full catalog of volumes for any of the municipalities. so i would have one volume for one year in one municipality, and then i would have one volume from another year and another municipality. and i had to sort of extrapolate outwards. but that's always dangerous to do, to presume that things are static over time. so i did the best that i could, but it was pretty obvious that i was not getting the whole story. i was not getting the whole quantity to sort of side of

things for the years that i don't see any arrests because of missing records. it's helpful to have archives like like this one and like the ones in newburyport. and what i mean by that is for the year 1861, for example. right. i'm a momentous year in american history that the arrest records are not there. right. so should i suppose that the laws are not on the books anymore because the civil war is coming new is freaking out. or should i presume that they are harshly? the assumptions are de the assumption of dangerous. in february of 1861. but as it turns out, this. does anybody know who this person is? right. this is a newburyport, guys. his name is stephen bray. right. he's a relative of somebody in the audience. i'll leave that for the. i'll leave that for the q&a session. right. but he was a captain of a vessel that sailed routinely from liverpool to new orleans and then back up to new england. and on one of these trips, he takes his wife, elizabeth, him. and elizabeth keeps a diary.

and elizabeth's diary has an entry for february in 1861, where she noticed that the steward for the ship, who was a free black man, was taken off the vessel and arrested and that her husband had to pay a very large sum to get him out of jail. so that tells me like so i know even though the quantitative stuff is not there, that's certainly being enforced. now, as problematic as new orleans is with its records, it's far better than that. just about every other port city in the south. so i have a very conservative estimate of about 20,000 total arrests over the antebellum period for all port cities. but if i had to guess, that number is considerably higher and this helps us sort of this suggests that the numbers are definitely much higher than than what i've tabulated. all right. no more numbers. there's a really great historian. her name is amy mural taylor. she once quipped, we must move beyond the enduring impulse to think about people in the aggregate. and i agree wholeheartedly. and so i want to get away from the aggregate.

and i actually want to talk about the individual experiences. so the first one i want to talk about is most daily and most daily arrived in charleston in 1824. and when he arrived, he was a. he was arrested. he was taken to jail. he went to court and he argued a bunch of different things to try to get out of being incarcerated. all of his arguments fail. the court finds him guilty. and but they don't just send him back to jail. they ordered him to go to the slave whipping post outside of the workhouse and get 13 lashes across his bare back. and his daily, william cook. william cook arrives in pensacola in 1854, and his captain leaves him there. the captains are supposed to pay for the cost of incarceration. they are supposed to make sure that bring whatever free sailors. they bring free like sailors they bring with them. they're supposed to be responsible for taking them out. but his his captain just left him there. and so the jailer told william

cook that he had to pay the expenses for his own incarcerate. and so he had no way pay this. and so he basically became a municipal worker. and he had to work in pensacola for a number of months before he could pay off his own jail fees that he never should have paid in the first place. and his fines. and then he was finally able to get on a and go northward. but he was basically municipal worker for a number of months. that is not a unique experience. that there's plenty of archival evidence that suggests that there are plenty of others that that suffered that same fate. john jones arrived in in 1843. he was a british. he was arrested and taken the jail. and while he was in the jail, the charleston jailer, who had a reputation for for being a bit violent, he told jones that he had to go sweep the jailhouse before the yard time was over. so he said, jones, go sweep the jailhouse. and jones says, no, you have no power over me.

i'm supposed to be sitting here, right? and according to the jailer, jones was much more colorful language than what i just gave you. jones said that that is all that he said. but eventually, because of this recalcitrance on the part of john jones, the beat him with a stick and the beating is so bad that they had to call the british council and to see what's going on. right. so, so beaten for insubordination. mary roberts. mary frances roberts arrives in mobile, alabama, in 1846. she is interrogated on board a vessel. she's brought into the county jail house. and while she's there, the jailer calls for her. and so she goes to the jailers office. and when she goes to the jailers office, he attempts to sexually assault her. and she's able to escape because the door slightly ajar and somebody happen to be walking by. when he made his when he made his attempt, actually, it was security back to her, sail to her cell and, pulled the cell door, shut. the british council was alerted to this. he filed a number of reports and

was sort of this turned into a bit of an international incident. but mary frances roberts was basically a victim of sexual assault. william forrester. he arrived in the territory of florida in 1835. key west. when he arrived there in 1835, this was his second time going to florida and being arrested for being for entering the territory illegally. and because it was the second time the florida statute that allowed for the law to come down very hard on him, his sentence. five years, enslavement to the highest bidder for the crime of being on a ship and sailing into into key west. the judge who sentenced him also turned out to be the highest bidder. and so he basically was able to purchase william foster. this one story has a happy ending. william faulkner's captain was a gas, so the captain that left cook to sort of like wither on the lake, wither in the principal jail. the other captain, forster's

captain, does the right thing. he goes to the bahamas, which is where he's shipping from. he gets a bunch of money. he comes back and he basically buys off. forster's enslaver to get him out of enslavement so he doesn't stay in american slavery long. he was born a free man of color, by the way. so this man had been a free man of color his entire life, then an american slave for a few months, over a month, and then liberated by his captain. so, again, some of these are more lightly idiosyncratic. they're not a whole lot of instances where we see enslavement of the records of sexual attempts of a sexual assault are slim. that doesn't mean that they didn't happen, just means that the records aren't there. but certainly the beating and the whippings and the municipal labor, those those sorts of instances happened all the time. and it makes you wonder it makes you wonder about this quarantine analogy, right? the whole sort of legal precipice. this is the whole legal edifice on which these laws stand is the idea that these laws are like

quarantine because free black sailors are dangerous with ideas. we have to keep them separate from the enslaved population. but you're not keeping them separate. you're leaving them on their vessels in port in the harbor. you're bringing them to shore in chains. you're putting them in jail. you're making them work in the city. you're beating them. you're sexually assaulting them. you're enslaving them. it seems to me this is not so much about quarantine. this is more about sharing the moral contagion. if the dangerous thing that free black sailors have is autonomy and liberty and the ability to live outside of the strict racial hierarchy of the south, then if you bring them on inshore in chains, right? if you force them to work without paying them, if you beat them up for any sort of instance of insubordinate action, if you sexually assault them, if you enslave them, you are literally curing the moral contagion. right. so it's perhaps not so much a quarantine as it is an attempt to beat the notion of authority out of our autonomy, out of the

free black maritime workforce. all right. that's enforcement. now, what about resistance? it's not enough to know what happens to a person. i'm sort of invoking sartre here. it's not up to know what was done to somebody. what's really important is how they react to it. and i've divided this into two different sort of concepts here. i have informal resistance. and by informal, i mean, how did in dividual black sailors attempt to evade the law or not? and then the next fight will be about formal resistance, which is not about how individuals are attempting to evade the law, but more about how a political effort was put into place to try to overturn the laws. right. so we'll start with the informal first. this is how individuals tried to bypass the law. obviously, the most common is black soldiers simply don't go on vessels that head to the south and we don't have a whole lot of like direct evidence people who choose one labor contract over another don't

often put it in their diary. why? so it's really challenging to know exactly how extensive this was. but we do have a bit of anecdotal evidence, james, where it was a free black sailor. he jumped ship in nassau, in the bahamas in 1836. and when the british officials asked him about it, he said, well, the vessels going to savannah and i sure it's not a one on a slave. they're right. and so he decided to jump ship and lose his wages rather than risk going to savannah. in 1857, a an american vessel was in merseyside, in liverpool. right. and it was accumulating a crew for a run to. two mobile. but the captain did not put mobile on some of the shipping articles and he told some of the sailors that were joining on that that he was going to new york when the crew found out. and by the way, there were 16 of the crew were black sailors. when these black sailors realized that they were going to mobile and not new york, they mutinied. and this is the mutiny of the james bogart and you can sort of read all about that.

this was this was little i mean, there was i mean, people died from from this mutiny because these free black sailors did not want to go to mobile. so we know that the free black maritime workforce all over the northeastern united states and in the british caribbean and in great britain, they know about the laws and they're trying to avoid it. all right. there are other ways that individuals try to resist the laws. one way is by what we now call passing. right. so the laws only apply to people of african descent, which means there are a number of individuals who claim native ancestry as a way to say the law is not applied to me that amos daily guy that had to go out in front of the slave work house and get 13 lashes across his back when he claimed that he should not be arrested, he said he a narragansett in india. he was from rhode island. he said, i am a narragansett indian. my mother is as well. and so he's claiming that his race means he shouldn't be arrested and he's probably also making a claim that because his mom, a narragansett native

american, then he is a narragansett indian, because it's matter lineal. right. and he has sort of the power to move around the country as you see fit. now that didn't work. obviously, the court said you are not native american or you have not proven you're native american. and this is sort of one of the more there's sometimes in in the archives, you read something and you're your jaw just drops. so the prosecutions witnesses testify that, yes, amos daly's comply action could mean that he's narragansett. it could mean that he's african-american. communities of african descent. and then they say, but his hair gives away because it is wooly. he must be of african descent. and that's why they find him guilty. there were five sailors who were arrested in havana, 1838, and they claim to be a native american heritage. and in this instance, the captain general of cuba allowed these native american sailors to stay onboard their vessel. but the captain general then told the u.s. consul, nicholas trist, that there would be no such exemptions in the future if anybody comes into cuba.

so the captain, general, whoever the arresting officer is, their word about who is what race that is, what's going to stand up in court. and that's how it's going to be applied. now, again, we don't know how often people successfully passed because there wouldn't be a there wouldn't be a record of that. right. but certainly, again, there's anecdotal evidence that this happened on occasion. and at the very least, status. and again, this is one of those sort of fascinating elements of the archive. there were three adolescents that i found in the record who were arrested at the age of 12 and 13 and in two instances, the arresting officer allowed them to be sort of the two, to have the captain sort of as a as a custodian. but in one instance, a 40 year old cabin boy was forced to be in jail with everybody else for the for the duration of his stay in port. so there's one instance in which we see force.

right. so there is a british captain, charles mcclain. he sails his boat, the susan king, into wilmington. deputy sheriffs board the vessel. they see one person, a black british sailor, who they say, we need to arrest that person. and the captain says, over my dead body and the deputy sale at the deputy sheriffs is no, we have we have no choice. we have to arrest him. and the captain says it's time. put the eight pounders on the quarter deck and aiming at the wharfs and he looks at the deputy officers is as you take him you're not going to have a wharf to park your boat at. and so the deputy sheriffs get off the boat and they leave this free black man on board. he was not he was not able to do any trading there in wilmington. and he got a tongue lashing from the foreign office. but i'm sure the the sailor, francis pascal was very happy that charles mcclain was his was his captain. all right. now formal resistance, the black community in the north, especially in massachusetts and

in new york, were leading the charge to highlight the brutality of these laws and the violence done against the free black maritime workforce. one of the ways they went about doing this was by using the press right? they used the public sphere as a way to elicit disgust from voters who would then force political leaders to do something about this harsh treatment. frederick douglass used his public actions as a megaphone to highlight these atrocious these atrocious actions on the part of southern port workers. he was not alone. several other african-american newspapers did likewise, like the color american, francis, the frederick douglass paper, the north star. but it wasn't just the black press. it was also the abolitionist press. right. and this is william powell, jr. he is the. first commissioned black surgeon for the u.s. army. i wanted to have a picture of his dad, but there is no picture

of his dad. so so i use william powell, jr. as a stand in for his dad. william powell, senior who ran a colored sailor's home, as we called it in new york city. and they opened one in new bedford. right. and he took copious notes from black sailors that came and stayed at his institution about how many people were being arrested and how they're being treated when they were there. and then he went to the national anti-slavery standard, and he wrote articles for this white abolitionist newspaper to highlight this atrocious behavior. so we see members of the community trying to use their their ability to access the public sphere as a way to sort of garner public outrage at what's going on. so that's mode of sort of formal, formal resistance. the other is the petition. and this is a portrait of david ruggles. he led the new york city vigilance committee. he actually helped frederick douglass make his way to new bedford. he led a petition drive to protest the treatment of black sailors in the american south

and in cuba. and he sent that petition to the u.s. congress, the person or the group that wrote the most petitions were black bostonians, william cornell and others. they're routinely writing petition after petition after petition, not just about the treatment of black sailors. i mean, they were petitioning everything the state of massachusetts ought to integrate schools. they had to allow interracial marriage. they had to expand, extend the franchise. they should allow black men to join the military. there were petitioning everything all the time. and one of the things that they petitioned was for the protection of black sailors. and it's that last part that's really fascinating, because all those other things that the black bostonians petitioned for, they were petitioning for state rights, not like the whites of states, but the rights that you are that you were given through the state. right. so the right to vote is is a state issue education is a state issue. so if you're if you want to have the right to integrate schools, you wouldn't contact washington.

you would contact your state capital. right. so most of these are petitions by william neal and others. they're about state rights that you would get from the state government. it's different. we're talking free black sailors and they're petitions are not about state citizenship. it's about national citizenship. and this is where we get to the larger ramifications of what's going on here. this is one of the big picture implications, because as it turns out, there, arguments about free black sailors and national citizenship is it's really novel. nobody's talking about national citizenship rights. not most people are not talking about national citizenship. citizenship rights in the antebellum period. that's something that is and that's strange for us because we think about american citizenship. that. that's right. right. but that wasn't the case before the civil war. but the people that are making the claim for a national citizenship and a birthright citizenship and national citizenship rights, including the right to move around the country, are black americans who are arguing for free, black soldiers to be able to go wherever they want.

and this is a really radical idea. and it's so radical that obviously it has it has repercussions. the highest court of the land. most people are aware of the dred scott decision. this is a decision in which chief justice roger tawney declares that black people, whether they are slaves or not, are not. it can never be citizens of the united states. as the supreme court said, they cannot and are not citizens of the united states. right now they're claiming the complete opposite. now, if the dred scott decision stopped there, that would be bad enough. but there's a double smack in the face here because not only is this tiny, say, people of color are not citizens, he also really, for the first time in the 1850s, he says. but there are these national citizenship rights that there are. he doesn't really elaborate much because he doesn't have to here, but he hints at the fact that if you were an american citizen, you have certain rights. he's probably thinking about the rights of slave holders to take property wherever they want in the country. that's probably what he's

thinking, but he's intimated he's buying an argument that national citizenship means something, something that is at the forefront of the fight against these black sailor laws. so he's doing sort of a double double smacking. not only are you not a citizen, but i'm going to buy your argument. there are national citizenship rights, but i'm not even going to apply to you. it's pretty obvious he knew about black sails. now the dred scott decision was not about black sailors. right? but when roger hawley was attorney general in 1832. that's a young roger torney. he was attorney general of the united states, and he wrote an advisory opinion to president jackson in which he said that free black sailors could not legally contest their confinement under these black slavery laws. why they're citizens of the united states. so so he initially wrote this opinion 25 years earlier about three black sailors. that then becomes one of the key pieces of dred scott.

things change, though. a lot happens between 1857, 1868, right? a gigantic civil war and then reconstruction and with reconstruction of the 14th amendment and the 14th amendment, basically dred scott. not only are are black people, citizens of the united states, but there's also national citizenship that everybody born in the united states are endowed with the privileges and immunities of citizenship. right. and that, for the most part, includes moving around the country unencumbered. right now, typically, we think of the radical republicans like like massachusetts don't charles sumner and the radical republicans as sort of being the authors of this. and they deserve their fair share of credit. i don't sort of i would never throw mud on charles sumner. right. but we should also be paying attention to some of the people who are articulating national citizenship and national citizenship rights for like 40 years before sumner takes a seat in congress. right. in a sense, he's using arguments that have been in the black press for a long time. and and using that to change the

face of the constitution. the second big implication, and that is seemingly unrelated, but as soon as you think about it, it's it's obviously not unrelated. and that is the future of immigration law. so before the 1870s, the federal government did not regulate immigration whatsoever. there were no immigration laws before the 1870s, and it's only after the 1870s that the federal government starts passing laws. and the first laws that they pass, the first national sort of federal immigration laws target a subset of chinese migrants. so the chinese exclusion acts right are usually how we refer them as a as a group. the chinese exclusion act and most immigration restrictions of the early 20th century that came afterward were largely predicated on the same notions of moral contagion that were used to justify the are the the the black savior laws.

right. so again, that image is kind of small here, but this is in a cartoon from a newspaper in the 1880s, and it's basically a chinese man and chinese man and it's basically saying that they are dirty, that they are violent, but they can't be trusted. and basically saying they should not be here. so this is a very xenophobic sort of political saying that chinese people are dangerous, they shouldn't be here. but that was not the extent of it, that they weren't just dangerous. they were also morally contagious. right. not only were they these things, they were also corrupt in the white youth of the united states with their opium dens. right. so you see plenty of pictures of chinese men serving opium and liquor to white women. and then plenty of stories of the yellow peril and sort of the problems with white women, west coast cities. so the danger is not just out there. the danger is also there morally contagious ability to turn to sort of corrupt americans.

and again, in a sense this is really similar. so so for pro-slavery ideologues in the antebellum period, one of the reasons they say it's moral contagion is to exonerate themselves for the conditions that cause slave revolt. right. they don't want to say slavery cause a slave revolt, even though all of us in this room know -- well that's what causes it. right. but they're saying, no, it's agitation that causes it. well, nobody's asking here. women are doing in opium dams in the first place that questions not. that would be something about domestic issues in the united states, whether it's gender relations or whether it's, you know, the problems of mass urbanization or industrializing america. we're not going to talk about that, that the reason that there's not important, it's the moral contagion of these individuals that we need to stop. very similar. when we look at immigration laws that target anarchists the turn of the 20th century. right. yes. they are dangerous to the picture of. an anarchist with a bomb behind the statue of liberty. right. and obviously, implication is if you let anarchists, then they're going to blow up stuff, right?

they're going to blow up stuff. but it was more than that. it wasn't just about them blowing up stuff. it was about their ability to slither in and convert this. american workers of the virtues of bolshevism communism, anarchism, etc. right so the danger isn't just a couple of stuff up. the danger is that they will be morally contagious and. they will spread it amongst the american proletariat. right. so again, if you embrace this ideology that it's outside agitation, you don't to worry about the problems of industrializing america and the labor problems in the united states itself. you can exonerate that and you can say the whole problem within work ism is not american. it is. it is foreign. and so if you do join the communist party. if you do join the anarchists, not only are you dangerous, but you're also un-american, right? as if you can't naturally be an anarchist in the united states. right. so those are the two big implications that sort of

radiate outward from from these experiences of three black sailors. and i probably run pretty close to time, so i would talk my students know this. i can talk for another 2 hours if need be. but you've been very kind and very patient with me. so it's time for me to return the favor and be kind of patient. and please encourage you to ask your questions. i think the folks at c-span or here don't have a microphone. so if you have a question, don't don't ask it right away. wait until they come up in and put the microphone in front of you. yeah, just raise your hand. any questions. so i've never heard of this before. it's really fascinating. was it well known throughout the sailing community of where they could go and couldn't go? and why would some of these people go? and in the case, a guy who went to key west twice. why did he do that? that's that's a great question. and so there is a really great

historian. he just retired from the university of new hampshire, jeff bolster, and he wrote a book called blackjacks about the black maritime workforce. generally speaking. and he made an interesting point. he said that for some free black sailors, they took it for granted that this is going to happen to them. but they in the maritime community, the ships that they the port cities that they worked at were going to be trading with the south. i mean, newburyport traded with new world, but they knew that they were going to stay in and, you know, be able to work, that that was going to be a sort of danger of the job and would just bolster said was some black sailors wore it as sort of like like they've prove their worth. it's like a masculine bravado like yes i went to new orleans. i suffered there i prove my worth as a as a valuable sailor. it's almost like this is sort of the dangers of the job, right. but for a lot of black sailors, they don't a whole lot of control about, you know, where the vessels go. but undoubtedly there are plenty that choose not go. right. but again, the free black maritime workforce there, they're resourceful. they're also vulnerable.

right. and if you're illiterate and you don't know what's on the shipping manifests in the ships in the water, you're kind of you're kind of in trouble. right. you're you're susceptible to being taken advantage of. is it well known? it's well known all over the place. but the british government puts a circular through the entire british west indies, letting people know if you go to these ports, don't be surprised when you get arrested. so not just the united states all over the caribbean, too. i was surprised you talked about a woman sailor. are there were there many? that's so that's a great question. no, the maritime world in the 19th century and afterwards, largely a masculine sphere. right. but the law applied to anybody that was on the vessels, including maritime workers. so even if you were a personal servant, the women that i highlighted here were personal servants. right. so the one young girl, she was 13, francis in new orleans, she was basically nanny for a like two year old. the tutor was the daughter of a presbyterian minister.

right so she was not a maritime worker, but she was on a maritime vessel. and so she was susceptible to. and then mary frances roberts was a stewardess, the captain. and what their exact relationship is, i don't know. one couldn't make an assumption about the relationship, given how quickly and how big this this turned into a pretty big incident that one wonders exactly how close that relationship really was. but they are not many women sailors. you touched in a single sentence about something that i interested me, but i haven't read much about, and it's a little bit myopic. the question is, but i like to say to my friends who don't know newburyport, i said what was built in my two favorite industries, whaling and slavery. is that accurate? and can you elaborate much about as. i said it's a little bit off topic, but about our hometown and how can she be role in the slave trade? yeah. so i should probably not answer that because there are i'm betting people in this room who

are better qualified to talk about the history of newburyport. so i know a lot more some of the sailing ships that came out of boston in new york. i don't know as much about about. i would not be surprised if that was the case, given some of the businesses that did business here, like the whitney company, that whitney company was like nonstop trading with with cotton out of out of new orleans. so i wouldn't be surprised if they were in the slavery business, too. but i'm not an and i shouldn't, especially in a room full of people from newburyport. i shouldn't. i shouldn't presume to tell you the history of this town unless i am. yeah, i'm. i'm an outsider, right? i don't want to come in and contaminate you with without fear of. saying i'm usually not humble. so i thought i'd read in several books that there were clusters of free blacks living in some of these southern cities. why weren't they where they considered sources of contamination? also? yeah, so that's a good question. and so you'll notice, though, that when i had that map of the

states in which you have free black sailors that are prohibited, you'll notice that maryland's not there. maryland overpasses, one of these in virginia doesn't pass one of these. right. and a lot of the watermen that work in those two areas, they are not. i mean, they could be affected by this, but they're not. and so there are clusters of what they call watermen. some of them worked inside of the chesapeake bay. so there are kind of maritime. so some of them were riverine. so working the rivers. so that is absolutely true in terms of black seals living in southern port cities. their populations. so i think it was martha putney did census research on this and then there of people that listed their jobs as, sailor or seamen, which tells you maritime not not watermen but the american meaning really living in the state that those numbers in southern port cities collapse in the 1840 in 1850s right so the population was way way down because the law say that if you live here and you leave on a vessel, you can't come back. now, there are some exceptions that are that are granted. you can ask for for exemption

ins or a license or something like that. but the rule of thumb is you can't come back. so, yeah, there are some, especially in virginia maryland, but certainly we get to the 1840 and 1850s, a number of black sailors in those cities is drastically reducing. i'm just wondering if you have any sense of how many these maritime workers, this workforce was made up of free black sailors in general? oh, that's good question. and that's something that that jeff bolster did a lot more work with, which is good, because it requires that quantitative history and databases that not exactly my forte. right. and he said that probably 20, 25%, but the number of black sailors on caribbean vessels figure. the caribbean is trading with the us south a lot. there are british consuls who say that there are plenty of ships with entirely black crews. right. so if we think about not just the us sort of merchant marine, but but the merchant marine throughout the caribbean, that number goes way than 25%.

and probably, you know, closer to half or more. i i'm a little confused on moral contagion. now, if a black man or black woman is accused, this person been on board ship for months and sometimes years. so why aren't all the other people on board ship also guilty? moral corruption? great question. right. so so this is this is where things get a little dicey right. and this is in like i will add your question is even i'll make your question even better for you. right. so in savannah, it wasn't just a black sailor that had david waters appeal him. there was also a white sailor that had it too, and that they don't impose a quarantine on white sailors. right. i think the idea was, is that we can probably legislate a way

black sailors coming in, but we can't legislate away way white sailors coming in. in other words, we will cut off all trade and we will not have our economy will collapse if we have no ships coming in. so how do if we say no ships from great britain, no ships in the british empire, and no in the northern united states? you don't have a whole lot of cotton sitting in your wharves, nowhere to go. so i think they probably a they pace people who are most vulnerable who probably had the least resources to fight this legally in court are people who are already denigrated in their own societies and probably you know, probably a combination of all of those things. if there were ships coming in from places, abolitionist activity was pretty high like a ship from boston. the white sailors would be watched pretty closely, too, but they wouldn't be taken jail, which is another way to answer that is racism. right.

i know you spoke about dred scott and the 14th amendment, but you're also told that a lot of these sailors are from these other places. you mentioned they're coming out of lawful. they're come out of jamaica, nassau. so what nationality were they if then they didn't have protection, that they don't have protection under international law? yeah, another fantastic question. right. so it. so what rights do black sailors from the british caribbean have when they enter the united states? that is a question is really open to interpreted. so when i had the picture of roger and had the picture of roger, tony here, when he issued that advisory opinion in 1832, he didn't just say that african-americans are not american citizens. he actually wrote the advisory opinion because the british consul general was asking about why blacks, blacks, those were being arrested from britain in the british caribbean. so when he wrote that advisory opinion, he talked about black britons, black british people

are not understood to be the people of great britain. he's telling raeburn how to define its subjects. right. and said when the. and he uses he uses historicism, bad historicism like we've heard about. what are the uses of original intent and originalism as a form of sort of legal interpretation in a sense, he's using a very bad form of originalism here. what he says is that the treaty between the united states and great britain was written in 1850. right. in 1815, both everybody who was there, who was writing that treaty they all understood that, both nations were a nation of white people. and if they presume and that black britons were the people of great britain, they never would have signed the treaty in first place. right. so, again, this is this is this is originalism run amuck. this is just really bad. original intent of legalism. but the question is a really good one. and it's so good that there are like volumes and volumes and volumes by british historians

that have talked about what rights that you have in the british empire. if you were not a white british, sort of in the house of lords or something like. right. and so it was really open to negotiation. usually, if the foreign office, the foreign minister writes to the foreign secretary, the person in charge of the office, if that person is a whig, they tend to be a little bit more assertive in claiming that the americans can't do this. and when the tories are in power, they tend to be a little bit more relaxed in trying to sort of like get black british sailors to be like skirt the law. how about you don't enforce it against the, you know, the black and let them stay on board their vessels. so one was more about informal diplomacy and the whigs were much more like palmerston was like, cannot do this right. but ultimately the british state doesn't put and with the exception of that captain does not put their guns where their mouth is with regards to the rights of black sailors sailors. yeah, i'm guessing must have

been instances, you know, pre-civil war of united states navy vessels with black sailors going into some of those ports as well as navy of other sovereign nations that would have had something to say about having their sailors impressed. we fought a war about, you know, the imprisonment of sailors. so, you know. yeah. so not too many naval vessels of other nations spending a lot of time southern ports. but there are u.s. vessels that do and i there's no in which a naval person working in the navy is being taken off the vessel. right now, i don't see anything codified, but i've never seen a naval vessel sort of. so i think it's probably pragmatics, right? your deputy sailor. that is the navy, right? you know, i think that probably is one of the reasons that virginia never passes one, because the importance of norfolk and probably why

baltimore to write in the naval arts around baltimore. but yeah, it doesn't happen. there are some british naval vessels that do make make around and there's no instances in which i've seen sources in which they're arrested either. right. so it's largely being applied to not the naval not the naval marine, but the merchant marine. nobody down there claims states rights. and so, you know. no, no, no. again, when when when. i mean, these are these are naval vessels and you are a vulnerable port. you got to you know, sometimes you think you're in don't enforce your own laws if it means the destruction of the port. i mean, if they're not going to do it, charles mcclain with one eight pounds cannon, they're certainly not going do it for, you know, a giant british warship pulls into to new orleans. mm hmm. all right. i can't. i can't resist. i've got a question in the case of stephen portrays ship captain bray from newburyport, elizabeth

bray notes he had to pay a very sum to get the stewart out of jail. and i wonder if you have a sense of did this turn it? you know, it began as this sort of moral contagion, maybe it really was. but did it also sort of turn into a way to turn a buck from these ships? oh, certainly. i mean, so the jail fees are are exorbitant. right. i mean. so some place. so the rates over time. right. unsurprised and given sort of the inflation and sort of boom and bust cycles and the lack of a national currency. right. so the costs are erratic, but sometimes they're charging, you know, sailors who are incarcerated for a week like 70 or $80, and they're making, you know, 12, $13 a month. right. and so now the statute in all the states are explicit that the captain is supposed to pay for this. right. so the captain's supposed to be doing this we don't know how often the captain takes it out of wages. we do have one instance where the captain tries to take out of their wages and they sue him and they file arrest proceeding,

which means they hold the ship and they say that we weren't we're not. we're liable for this. the captain has to pass wages. and they actually win and they get their their wages reimbursed to them. but, yeah, there is a considerable amount of money going into the jailers. you would never know this by the state of southern jailhouse like the new orleans jailhouse is is. you saw the charleston jailhouse is pretty pretty pretty nasty too to rebuild only three or four times. it's falling. so, yeah, the the the jails are dilapidated, but there's a quite a bit of money coming into city coffers from from arrests. yeah. so is this. i don't think they're doing this strictly for the moneymaking game, but certainly that's a, you know, a beneficial side effect from their point of view. right. i'm actually i know. i want to so i'm writing a second book and it's about black immigration laws inside the united states like interstate immigration laws and certainly in places like saint louis are definitely doing this for the money.

there are people that are getting caught embezzling money for the arrest of black interstate migrants. so so it's not beyond the pale that minstrel officers were using this as a way to sort of line their pockets or the city's pockets. the first person you talked about, amos was walking the streets of charleston. correct. and got picked. now, he was on busses. he on vessel? yeah. if there that many free black people on vessel and the local authority were boarding the ships and hauling people to jail. there must have been more than one given the. i know you don't want to talk numbers but were they taking numerous people off the ships and rolling them? yeah. yeah. so, john jones, the guy that gets beaten for insubordination, he tells a jailer, i'm sweeping the jailhouse. there were four people arrested with him. if go through like the. so i'll go back to the the new way the new orleans record book

eventually. there we go. right so there are some sort of volumes, the names here are 14 or 15 long. you're taking them all to jail. most of the antebellum jails have guards, too. and there's so many that i'm not exactly sure how they're housing them. but they're overflowing. there are i mean, there are some local newspaper accounts that talk about how many people housed in local jail. and it's a lot more than you could possibly more than you think would fit in these in these these old dilapidated buildings. yeah. they should've been that money to build more you to build more jails and mass incarceration, antebellum style. did you encounter any records of was there pushback from the shipping companies or the ship owners there? objection. or was this just the cost of doing business? yes. so some of the earliest petitions i talked about, black petitioners, captains often sign on either cosigners of this and some of them sent in their own

petitions. what they were mostly arguing was about the commerce clause. so they're upset the fact that they're paying more because, that to pay for these costs of incarceration and they know that they. can often i mean, usually black black was made pretty close to the same as white sailors, but sometimes they make a little bit less. and so now they're being forced. now it's not it's not cost effective to use black citizens. but. but to answer your question. so when they petitioned, they usually focused on the commerce clause, right? so congress congress has the power to regulate interstate trade. and so they claim that these that these states are regulating interstate. i have an interstate trading. i have an interstate trading vessel. they are costing me money. that is a regulation of trade. and again, what they claim is no, this is a quarantine law. and it doesn't matter if you can be, you know, the states have run the quarantine laws since like the colonies did. i mean, the colonies have had quarantine laws on the books like since the middle of the 1600s. and so for a long time, they've had the power to quarantine. and so the states have the power to to determine what is danger,

risk to the health, safety, morals of the people of that state. and they're claiming that that's that sorry, yet, baby, it's what they said. this is the phrase. it is. it's incidental to commerce. it does affect it, but it is not at its heart a regulation of commerce. and so usually those petitions that claim the commerce clause fell by the wayside. now, there are some people that that like daniel webster. right. says that's garbage. right. of course. this is a regulation of trade. of course this is the states interfering in interstate trade. and these laws should be struck down on commerce clause grounds. but the supreme court never comes even close to saying anything like that. all right. all right. thank you very much. i've had a wonderful time.